Dart is an open-source, scalable programming language, with robust libraries and runtimes, for building web, server, and mobile apps.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Strong Dart presence at Google I/O 2013

Google I/O 2013 was a breakout event for Dart. The conference featured three well attended Dart talks, a Dart code lab, and a crowded Dart booth.

Seth Ladd interviews Lars Bak and Kasper Lund about the state of Dart from the floor of Moscone Center. Dart is now running twice as fast as JavaScript on certain benchmarks. The language and the core libraries are stable, and Dart expects to reach 1.0 status in a few months.

Dart sessions at I/O

Google I/O 2013 featured three Dart talks (videos embedded below).

Web Languages and VMs: Fast Code is Always in Fashion

One popular part of their talk was a demo showing Dart's support for SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) processing. SIMD allows for a big performance boost. Without SIMD, their skeletal animation example supported only about 30 monsters (first image, below). With SIMD, that number increased to about 120 (second image).

Dart booth at the Developer Sandbox

The Dart booth at I/O was a busy, bustling place. Conference attendees got to watch cool Dart demos, interact with Dart engineers, and pick up some nice Dart swag!

Shailen Tuli shows the results of benchmarking code in the Dart VM, dart2js, and hand-written JavaScript. The Dart VM won handily, with the JavaScript compiled by dart2js neck and neck with handwritten JavaScript.

Adobe shows off the Toolkit for Dart

Adobe released the Toolkit for Dart for Adobe Flash Professional at I/O. The toolkit lets designers and animators create assets for HTML5 projects using Dart libraries and supports most of the core animation and illustration capabilities of Flash Professional.

Playing an HTML5 game built with Flash Pro, exported to Dart with the push of a button!